This dissertation reports the results of research into the provision of adaptive user interfaces to support individuals in the management of their personal information. Many individuals find that they have increased responsibility for managing aspects of their own lives, including the information associated with their jobs. In contrast with traditional approaches to information management, which are generally driven by organisational or business requirements, the requirements of personal information management systems tend to be less rigidly defined. This dissertation employs research from the areas of personal information management and adaptive user interfaces - systems which can monitor how they are used, and adapt on a personal level to their user - to address some of the particular requirements of personal information management systems. An adaptive user interface can be implemented using a variety of techniques, and this dissertation draws on research from the area of software agents to suggest that reactive software agents can be fruitfully applied to realise the required adaptivity. The reactive approach is then used in the specification and development of an adaptive interface which supports simple elements of personal information management tasks. The resulting application is evaluated by means of user trials and a usability inspection, and the theoretical architectures and techniques used in the specification and development of the software are critically appraised. The dissertation demonstrates an application of reactive software agents in adaptive systems design and shows how the behaviour of the system can be specified based on the analysis of some representative personal information management tasks.

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The coarse mesh radiation transport (COMET) code uses response functions to solve the neutron transport equation. Most nuclear codes used today have a very steep learning curve; COMET is no exception. To ease the user's onus of learning how to create correctly formatted COMET input-files, a graphical user interface (GUI) was created. The GUI allows the user to select values for all the relevant variables while simultaneously minimizing the errors a typical new user would make. To this end, the GUI creates all of the input files required to run COMET. The GUI also provides a visualization tool that the user may use to check the problem geometry before running COMET. The GUI is also responsible for post-processing the COMET output for visualization with TecPlot. In addition to the GUI, multi-group cross section libraries were generated as part of the MHTGR-350 (Modular High Temperature Gas Reactor) benchmark problem under development at Georgia Tech. This project aims to couple COMET with a thermal hydraulics code to best model the true physics of the reactor design. In order for this goal to be actualized, six-group cross sections were generated over the operational temperature range of the MHTGR using the current coupling and collision probability code HELIOS.

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End-users tend to lose their way in the maze of information within hypertext. Much work done to address the "lost in hyperspace" problem is reactive, that is, doing remedial work to correct the deficiencies within hypertexts because they are (or were) poorly designed and built. What if solutions are sought to avoid the problem? What if we do things well from the start? This thesis reviews the "lost in hyperspace" problem, and suggests a framework to understand the design and usability issues. These issues cannot be seen as purely psychological or purely computing, they are multi-disciplinary. The proactive, multi-disciplinary approach undertaken in this thesis is drawn from current technologies in sub-disciplines of hypertext, human-computer interaction, cognitive psychology and software engineering, and they include investigations into: " good design principles and guidelines for the building of hypertexts in the first place; " task analysis and user modelling techniques for end-users' tasks to be carefully defined; " effective hypertext structures to ensure usability of hypertexts; and " designer tools to create hypertexts with a reduced tendency for the "lost in hyperspace" problem to arise. To demonstrate these ideas, this thesis presents HyperAT, a hypertext research authoring tool, developed to help designers build usable web documents on the World Wide Web. The World Wide Web is chosen as a hypertext example since it is the most widely used and largest hypertext system ever. The approach taken in HyperAT is novel: multi-disciplinary approaches are integrated and implemented with a practical authoring tool. Evaluation of HyperAT indicates that it does address the "lost in hyperspace" problem, particularly for the World Wide Web by: (i) helping designers manage the complexity of the design and validation processes; and (ii) helping hypertext end-users navigate hypertexts produced by HyperAT without getting "lost".

This thesis investigates ways to reduce or eliminate the necessity of user input to learning-based personal email spam filters. Personal spam filters have been shown in previous studies to yield superior effectiveness, at the cost of requiring extensive user training which may be burdensome or impossible. This work describes new approaches to solve the problem of building a personal spam filter that requires minimal user feedback. An initial study investigates how well a personal filter can learn from different sources of data, as opposed to user’s messages. Our initial studies show that inter-user training yields substantially inferior results to intra-user training using the best known methods. Moreover, contrary to previous literature, it is found that transfer learning degrades the performance of spam filters when the source of training and test sets belong to two different users or different times. We also adapt and modify a graph-based semi-supervising learning algorithm to build a filter that can classify an entire inbox trained on twenty or fewer user judgments. Our experiments show that this approach compares well with previous techniques when trained on as few as two training examples. We also present the toolkit we developed to perform privacy-preserving user studies on spam filters. This toolkit allows researchers to evaluate any spam filter that conforms to a standard interface defined by TREC, on real users’ email boxes. Researchers have access only to the TREC-style result file, and not to any content of a user’s email stream. To eliminate the necessity of feedback from the user, we build a personal autonomous filter that learns exclusively on the result of a global spam filter. Our laboratory experiments show that learning filters with no user input can substantially improve the results of open-source and industry-leading commercial filters that employ no user-specific training. We use our toolkit to validate the performance of the autonomous filter in a user study.

This master project focuses on the development of a front-end applicationfor cloud computing. Traditionally, televisions have been excluded from thealways connected world. With the appearance of the smart televisions it isnow possible to connect them to the Internet. However, there still exists agap between televisions and services in the cloud.To solve the problem,we have developed a JavaScript application. This application allows the user to log into their CloudMe account from a SamsungSmartTV with multimedia support. This application is centered on improving the responsiveness performance of a cloud computing application. It alsoenhances the user experience by creating a user-friendly UI for a television.During the course of this thesis, the application and its functionalities havebeen studied, designed, developed, optimized and finally tested. We havealso done a set of measurements to validate the responsiveness of the proposed design.The development of this TV application shows the TV is a potential targetdevice for cloud computing services due to its better resources and capabilities in di↵erent areas such as multimedia reproduction.

This research project focussed on discarded clothing and textiles, as signifiers for the lowest exchange value in the fashion system, and sought methods to add value by up-cycling1 into one of a kind fashion garments. Opportunities to add value were investigated with three main ideas emerging which include up-cycling the visual appearance of the garment or textiles through restyling, user interaction, and creating a narrative for the garment. The practice focussed on developing methods to incorporate these concepts as a way of extending the life of low value textiles into items that could be re-introduced into the fashion cycle2. Walker (2008) suggests that by conveying the story of a product to the consumer, the perception of value increased, and opportunities to explore this concept were investigated during the project. Experimentation with a variety of materials and techniques resulted in developing a method to re-fabricate3 threadbare and stained garments into a new material. User participation4 was investigated as a way to ‘add value,’ as it was hoped that by enabling the user to interact with the design they would value the item more. Exploring this concept led to the development of a range of garments and garment kits that enabled the user to learn techniques and make garments using discarded textiles and clothing. The garments and kits were developed using methods and techniques that could be easily mastered and used materials that would be readily available to the user. The development of the garment kits reframed the user as a designer/maker, which is sometimes referred to as participatory design,5 and Followed Fletcher’s (2008) directive that for practical reasons, the methods need to be low tech and inexpensive. A group of research participants trialled the garment kits, made their own garment and provided feedback, which informed the final phase of the project and the development of revised kits and garments. The project suggests potential opportunities for the fashion designer may exist by focussing on the use of existing resources and heightened user connectivity in the design of garments.